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Hannibal: Episode 7 Recap

For the first time in this condemned series the seventh episode felt like it was the beginning of the end. It felt desperate. There was sustained gratuitous violence, a human foetus inside a pig and a homage to a Nick Cage film. This is most certainly the end times.

This episode was about couples, so let’s start with the Romeo et Juliette of the series, Hannibal and Will. They were in a bit of a pickle (more of which later) at the end of last episode and the beginning of this episode told us how they got there. The Florentine police department find Hannibal sawing into Will’s skull. Again, nobody in the series seems to be capable of surprise and the frighteningly jaded officers barely blink at the sight of a large Lithuanian gentleman attempting to remove the cranium of a still conscious FBI agent. The horror they must have seen to not be remotely surprised by that doesn’t bare thinking about. Being from Florence, maybe they saw Tom Hanks’ hair during filming for the Da Vinci Code and haven’t been the same since? Anyway back to the dinner table and Jack, who’s being forced to watch Hannibal’s foray into neurosurgery, has got the police’s number saying “I don’t imagine you’re here to make an arrest”. No Jack, they’re not. Instead, bent as they are by Mason’s money, they take Hannibal and Will and hand them over to Mason, which brings us back to the end of last episode where they were hanging with the pigs.

Cordell and Mason – continuing their complete transformation into Gregg Wallace and John Torode – spend ages informing Hannibal about the best ways to cook him. They’re one step away from making a buttery biscuit base out of Hannibal’s nuts. This is a dangerous game to play with Hannibal Lecter and Alana Bloom vocalises the blindingly obvious but delightfully ominous warning “play with your food, Mason, and you give it the opportunity to bite back”. But play he does and next up is a game of guess the film as Mason decides he rather likes Will’s face and would like to own it permanently. The canon of Nicholas Cage isn’t one I’d expect a series with pretensions as lofty as Hannibal’s to plum for cultural references and, like a face transplant performed by the sausage fingers of Gregg Wallace, it sits uncomfortably. When Mason wakes up from the anesthetic – given to him by Cordell – he finds that all is not well. He knows this because he’s wearing the face of the man who was supposed to be operating on him. The food bit back.

But how? Considering we last saw Hannibal strung up in the pigsty, it’s fairly impressive. But he had help. Alana and her lover Margot (Mason’s sister) cut him loose after they’d rather had enough of Mason’s annoying little psychotic ways. The last straw came after Mason had thoughtfully put a human foetus created from his sister’s eggs inside a pig. The straws are beginning to build on my back as well. The series is now simply going for shock over substance. Jumping the shark is often used to describe the specific moment at which a show loses credibility, well, now we have a new saying: Hannibal has ‘entered the pig’. And I’m not sure it’ll ever find it’s way out.

Hannibal makes good his escape carrying a wozy Will with him. At Will’s house he and Hannibal say goodbye for what seems like the final time and Hannibal leaves. Or does he? No is the answer because when Jack turns up a while later to look for him he’s still there in the garden (maybe he missed his train?) and hands himself in.

For the first time I can see why nobody seems to want to pick up this increasingly ludicrous show, they don’t want to lose face.